August 12, 2011

Lisbon. October, 2009

My friends Donna and Emilia recently returned from Lisbon where they stayed in a small hotel over a bridal shop. Breakfast included. But they never had breakfast in their hotel, they told me, because each day they toddled on down to this wonderful cafe and bakery, the Casa Brasileira on the Rua Augusta, to try yet another of their seemingly endless assortment of confections. Look at those spikey, sugary things on the lower left up there. You can almost imagine how they’d collapse in a brittle surprise the minute you bit into them. I loved each of my own visits here, slowly learning the names of the pastries, many of them named for different saints, many solely named for their shapes or ingredients or both. Over on the right, can you pick out the “apple snails” and the “fruit rocks”?